Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don't just throw away a laptop because it's banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen.

Dana Blankenhorn yesterday called the OLPC project a failure for its inability to mass market a low-cost Linux laptop. Dana’s definition of failure, in this case, seems to be based on the quantity of XO laptops distributed.

This weekend I put together a new machine for my home office to complement the iMac on my desktop. Since I didn’t want to fill up the desk with another mouse and keyboard, I decided to get a USB KVM (Keyboard, Video, Monitor) switch that allows me to go back and forth between the two machines.

Upon reading responses to my previous post, I decided to put some of the community’s suggestions to the test and examine some of the other options out there. Of the suggestions given, I primarily focused my attention on Debian (Lenny), Damn Small Linux and the wattOS beta.

I have set myself a target of 1 month without booting to windows.
A little history --
1) I use Windows 2003 at Office.
2) I have tried many Linux distributions including Arch, Gentoo, Ubuntu and openSUSE and now have the perfect windows replacement at home -- PCLinuxOS.

Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production.

Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

"The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom [...] I now expect that the main effect of the OLPC project—if it succeeds—will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft users.

As the years go by, many computers start to slow down. One way to breathe new life into an old computer is to re-install Windows but, unless you have all the required discs, this can be tricky. One easier way to bring an old computer back up to speed is to install a copy of Linux.

I first tried Wolvix as a live CD in its 1.0.5 version back in November 2006 and was immediately blown away by it (read my review here). Since then I've had Wolvix 1.1.0 (Hunter) installed in two different virtual machines and a laptop, as well as having run it repeatedly as a live CD on various machines, and it has never let me down once.